Get 'em off! (ooer missus)

My one-man crusade to get gmtv taken off air continues.

While I wake up to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on my radio alarm, because I’m second down to the kitchen every morning, I am forced to endure the banality that is gmtv.

I have nothing against Ben Shepherd or Andrew Castle, who both seem decent chaps, but I admit to an intense dislike of Emma Crosby*, who is so far out of her depth she should now be over the horizon; nor am I too keen on Penny Smith, who seems to be more concerned with self-promotion than anything else.

Yet, as difficult as it is to ignore personalities, particularly with a tv programme that insists on perpetuating the cult of personality, I’m going to try to concentrate on issues.

The 7am news on Today informed me that election-winning German chancellor Angela Merkel was now in a position to ditch her coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), and move towards a coalition with the right-leaning, pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).

Not surprisingly, for a radio station with decent journalistic values, a German government moving to the right, in however small an increment, was considered newsworthy.

Not so on gmtv though. I waited and waited, but the 7.30 bulletin finished with the market-crashing news that an act in the equally banal X Factor had been disqualified because one of the members of the band had lied about her age.

After my darling wife had cleared up the bowl of Golden Nuggets I stole from our youngest and hurled in the direction of the grinning Penny Smith, she decided to take me to task over my sudden interest in German politics.

My wife and I often have heated discussions on politics – in general that is, not just those in Germany. She comes from the side which would have accused Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as being part of a loony-left conspiracy, while I, wearing my social conscience like a badge of honour, purport to be a socialist, while being happy to enjoy a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and not even purchasing the occasional copy of the Big Issue.

She asked why I thought voters were moving to the right. She believed it was because they were fed up with the ‘socialist’ government of Gordon Brown – I use the inverted commas advisedly – while I suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that maybe they intended to annex the Sudetenland, omitting to point out the obvious flaw in her argument: that Brown was not in the German government.

This led on to a debate about whether the current New Labour government – or indeed party – was left-wing in any way, shape or form.

By the time I’d finished my socialist diatribe against Blair and Brown’s shift to the right, she and her two sons had already departed the family home, leaving me to contemplate my high blood pressure, a cold cup of coffee and soggy piece of flaccid toast.

But at least I could now turn over to Sky Sports News for my own helping of mind-numbing gossip.

*Apparently this vacuous bint is on £120,000 a year. And yet we still harp on about MPs’ expenses…